On the evening of July 10, 2026, a GEO Group employee named Brandon Booth pulled a personal firearm from his cross-body bag, walked into the middle of the street, and fired a single round at two women who were walking away from a protest outside the Aurora ICE Processing Center in Colorado. The bullet struck Emma Landis, 22, in the back of her foot. Landis, who had been exercising her constitutional right to demonstrate against immigrant detention, remembers turning her back and walking away before the shot came.

"'As soon as I had my back turned, that was when he shot, and it hit my foot.'"
— Emma Landis, speaking to CBS Colorado

Booth, 42, was arrested by Aurora police on suspicion of attempted second-degree murder, first-degree assault, attempted first-degree assault, felony menacing, and unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon. He was held on $500,000 bail and booked into the Adams County jail. In the arrest affidavit, Booth reportedly told police he "'did some dumb shit'" and that he only meant to scare the protesters — an admission that he pointed a loaded weapon at two unarmed women and pulled the trigger with the intent to terrify them.

GEO Group, the $2.3 billion private prison corporation that operates the Aurora facility under contract with ICE, placed Booth on unpaid administrative leave and issued a statement saying it would "'fully cooperate with law enforcement.'" The corporation claimed Booth was off-duty at the time of the shooting. DHS distanced itself entirely: "'No ICE personnel were involved in this incident.'"

This is the private prison industry's model: profit from human suffering, offload liability to individual contractors, and let the bullets fall where they may.

The Shooter, the Victim, and the Moment It Happened

The details of what happened that evening, laid out in the Aurora Police Department's arrest affidavit and corroborated by multiple witnesses, paint a picture of a man who escalated from verbal confrontation to attempted lethal force in seconds — and of a system that put a weapon in his hands.

Brandon Booth was not a law enforcement officer. He was a shift worker for a for-profit corporation — one of the approximately 31,000 people that GEO Group employs to run detention centers across the country. He had worked at the Aurora facility for three years, according to his own statements to police. He had no formal weapons training. He arrived at the facility around 7:30 p.m. on July 10 to begin his shift and found his path blocked by protesters who had gathered for one of the weekly vigils held outside the detention center.

Booth was waiting outside his vehicle along North Nome Street with other GEO Group employees, unable to enter the facility because of the demonstration. Two women — including Landis — walked by the group and began yelling at them, calling them "'race traitors, Nazis and other derogatory terms commonly used against employees at the Geo facility,'" Aurora police wrote in the affidavit.

The women shouted that they would run the employees' license plates to find out where they lived and where their children attended school. Booth told police the women said they would "'have people at (his) kids' school.'"

"'Booth stated this threat regarding his children caused his anger level to reach a 15 out of 10.'"
— Aurora Police Department arrest affidavit

Booth told investigators that he did not think the threats were viable or that his children were in immediate danger, and that he acted impulsively. He withdrew a personally owned pistol he was carrying in his cross-body bag. He walked into the middle of the street and fired because he wanted to scare the women, not injure them, and he claimed he tried to aim between them. "'Booth stated he is a better shot than demonstrated and that if he had intended to hit someone, he would have,'" Aurora detectives wrote. After he fired, he told police, he realized "'he had done some dumb (expletive)'" and fled the scene in his Chevrolet Tahoe. Multiple Aurora police officers and SWAT team members who were already on scene monitoring the protest witnessed the shooting. Officers tied a tourniquet around Landis's leg and pursued Booth as he fled. Police pulled him over and detained him near East 37th Avenue and Havana Street, less than two miles from the detention facility.

Landis says the GEO employees who witnessed the shooting did nothing to help her. "'Instead of calling anyone or any of those people, putting any effort into helping me, they all left. I had to call 911 myself,'" she told reporters. She was transported to the hospital, treated for the gunshot wound, and is now recovering at home. The second woman was not injured.

Three days after being shot, Emma Landis returned to protest outside the facility — on crutches, her lower-right leg bandaged, to speak to a crowd gathered outside the prison.

"'100%, I will continue to advocate for this stuff. I will continue to. I got shot for it. Yeah, I care. If you're frustrated about these things, if this stuff makes you upset, like actively do stuff.'"
— Emma Landis, speaking to CBS Colorado after returning to protest on crutches

Booth's own history paints a troubling picture. His former sister-in-law, Destiny Winter, told the Denver Post that Booth has long been a bully. She filed for a protection order against him in 2015 after she said he slammed her into a wall during an argument, giving her a concussion that temporarily erased three days of her memories. "'This is not a good person at all. This is not a person who does the right thing or respects boundaries, especially of women and kids. This is not a person who is willing to hold himself accountable for mistakes. This is, I am going to get you back. Retaliation, invoking fear so people don't speak up,'" Winter said. There is no record that Booth was charged with a crime in connection with the 2015 incident.

Emma Landis standing on crutches with bandaged leg speaking to supporters outside the Aurora ICE detention center

The Facility: Aurora ICE Processing Center

The Aurora ICE Processing Center, operated by GEO Group under contract with ICE, is one of the largest immigrant detention facilities in the United States. It houses approximately 1,500 people at any given time. The facility has been a lightning rod for protests for years — and a documented site of abuse. Similar scenes have played out at detention centers across the country: at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where protesters demanded an end to ICE killings under the banner "No More ICE Murders"; at Delaney Hall in Newark, where a week of clashes between protesters and federal agents culminated in a hunger strike by detainees; and in Oregon, where federal enforcement descended on Main Street communities with the same militarized apparatus.

Jennifer Piper, program director for the American Friends Service Committee, told the Denver Post that the protesters generally are not hostile toward the guards but want to hold GEO Group accountable for harm caused by understaffing and neglect. "'We're not out there to protest the guards themselves. We're out there protesting the system,'" she said. Thursday, July 10, was the first time an act of violence marred the vigils outside the detention center.

The facility has a documented history of medical neglect, forced labor, and inhumane conditions. In July 2026, Colorado health officials ordered the facility to submit to tuberculosis inspections after multiple cases were reported among detainees. The outbreak was so severe that state and local health officials engaged in a standoff with GEO Group and ICE seeking to investigate a tuberculosis infection identified in a detainee. Guards at the facility — including Booth — were working long hours without adequate protective equipment during the outbreak.

Activist Jeanette Vizguerra, who came to Colorado from Mexico in 1997 and has become a prominent voice against immigrant detention, has publicly decried conditions inside the facility. She has heard from detainees about widespread TB infections and stated that the corporation "'operates for-profit private prisons for the government and wants immunity from responsibility for what happens to people inside.'"

Andrea Loya, the executive director of Casa de Paz, a nonprofit near the ICE detention facility that works with detainees, said the shooting raises further concerns about ICE's new contract with GEO Group to reopen a former prison in Hudson, northeast of Denver, for use as a second major immigrant detention center in Colorado. "'We are deeply concerned that people who clearly don't have the emotional capacity to deal with potential conflict are handling human lives, and they will expand to Hudson. Human life is not valued by this corporation or its employees,'" Loya said.

Demonstrators gather outside of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Denver Contract Detention Facility, operated by GEO Group

The Privatization of State Violence

What happened to Emma Landis is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of a decades-long project to outsource state violence to private corporations that answer to shareholders, not the Constitution. As our reporting on the immigrant prison boom has documented, the private detention industry receives billions in federal funding while accountability evaporates. The same economic logic that drives GEO Group's $2.3 billion revenue machine — maximize capacity, minimize costs, privatize liability — has produced a carceral system where human beings are commodities.

GEO Group is one of the two largest private prison companies in the United States, alongside CoreCivic. Together, the two corporations generate approximately $5 billion in annual revenue, with the majority of their income coming from federal ICE contracts. GEO Group alone reported $2.3 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2025, employs roughly 31,000 people, and operates more than 130 detention centers and prisons worldwide, housing an average daily population of approximately 80,000 people.

The corporation's record is grim. Multiple lawsuits have alleged medical neglect resulting in detainee deaths. Allegations of forced labor — detainees paid as little as $1 per day for facility work — have dogged the company for years. A 2020 DHS Office of Inspector General report found "'significant deficiencies'" in medical care at GEO facilities. The company has faced allegations of human trafficking and sexual abuse at multiple locations.

ICE pays private operators approximately $127 to $200 per detainee per day. That per-diem structure creates an incentive to maximize capacity while minimizing costs — cutting corners on food, medical care, staffing, and training. It is a system where every dollar saved on a guard's training is a dollar added to shareholder value, and where putting an armed, untrained man like Brandon Booth on the perimeter of a detention center during a protest is a rational business decision, not a moral failure.

The industry spends millions on political influence. According to OpenSecrets, private prison companies spent $3.4 million on lobbying in 2024 alone. Major recipients of GEO Group political donations include Republican members of Congress who support expanded immigration enforcement — the same politicians who ensure that federal ICE contracts keep flowing.

On July 9, 2026 — one day before Brandon Booth shot Emma Landis — ICE signed a five-year contract worth up to $529 million with GEO Group to reopen the shuttered Hudson Correctional Facility in Hudson, Colorado, and convert it into a second major immigrant detention center. The contract will nearly double Colorado's immigration detention capacity to approximately 2,700 beds. The facility will expand GEO Group's footprint in the state even as the corporation faces scrutiny over the shooting, the tuberculosis outbreak, and years of documented abuse at its Aurora facility. That contract is part of a broader pattern of political weaponization of federal spending — the same administration that funds GEO Group's expansion has admitted, in a federal court filing, to canceling $7.5 billion in clean energy grants to states that voted against Trump while sparing identical grants in Republican states. The money flows one direction: toward the machinery of detention and enforcement, away from the communities that oppose it.

The Criminalization of Solidarity

The shooting of Emma Landis did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a political climate where the federal government is actively criminalizing immigration solidarity work. Across the country, the DOJ is charging ICE protesters with federal conspiracy under a Civil War-era statute, carrying potential sentences of up to six years in federal prison. Treasure Thoreson, a special education teacher in Minneapolis, was arrested in her pajamas by Homeland Security agents on conspiracy charges for participating in blockades at an ICE facility. In Spokane, three defendants were convicted of the same charge after a trial where a federal prosecutor resigned rather than sign the indictment. The violence at detention centers has escalated far beyond Landis's shooting — ICE agents have killed multiple people since Trump took office, including an innocent man in Houston and two people in a single week of enforcement. When ICE fabricated 550+ assault charges to justify its lethal force, the pattern became unmistakable: the state kills, then files paperwork to claim it was self-defense.

The message is unmistakable: protesting immigration enforcement has become a crime. And the enforcement — increasingly — is being carried out not by government agents, but by private contractors who answer to shareholders, not the Constitution.

Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain called the shooting "'a tragedy on all fronts'" and pledged transparency. But the institutional architecture that produced this moment remains intact. GEO Group still holds its ICE contracts. The federal government still pays private corporations to cage human beings. And the guards who patrol those cages still carry personal weapons onto the job with no training requirements and no accountability framework.

Landis was shot for walking on a sidewalk outside a detention center. She was shot in the back — literally, she had turned away. The man who shot her told police he meant to scare her, that he was "'a better shot'" than the bullet demonstrated, and that he "'did some dumb shit.'" GEO Group called it an individual incident and placed him on unpaid leave. The federal government said no ICE personnel were involved — because ICE doesn't do the dirty work itself anymore. It pays GEO Group to do it.

But it is not an individual incident. It is the consequence of a system that privatizes human cages, militarizes their perimeters, and treats constitutional dissent as a threat to profit. Emma Landis was shot because the infrastructure of state violence now runs through the private sector — and in that infrastructure, protesters are obstacles to be eliminated, and shooting an unarmed woman in the back is just the cost of doing business. The $529 million contract signed the day before the shooting tells you everything you need to know about what this system values: expansion, not accountability. Profit, not people. And the next time a protester stands outside a GEO Group facility, they will know that the corporation has already decided their life is worth less than a quarterly earnings report.